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tv   Charlie Rose  PBS  March 21, 2013 11:00pm-12:00am PDT

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>> rose: welcome to the program. we begin this evening with the president's trip to israel, and we talk about it with martin indyk, former ambassador to israel, itamar rabinovich from israeli ambassador to the united states. >> unless he makes it clear that he's behind kerry, they
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won't take kerry seriously. >> rose: why is that hard to do? >> because i think, because the president, we'll see but i think the president has basically decided the middle east is a place he wants to turn his back on. he wants to focus on the greener pastures of asia. >> i would say if i may that the risk is not just domestic, it's global. because of the linkage, if you fail in the middle east it resonates in north korea and vice versa. so the risk is broader than just the domestic price to be paid. >> rose: we continue this evening with a look at the frontier of medicine and how information, data is being used to understand illness and to provide us with an early warning. we talk with jeffrey hammerbacher, he is chief scientist at cloudera. >> and we went through a period in which data generation seemed to grow exponentially and that lead to the requirement to build
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software that could then collect and analyze that data. so if you look at the world wide web, all of a sudden we were taking all the documents, all of the speak jacks that people were-- the text and placing them on-line into an open reposit other of linked data called the world wide web and it turned out there was value latent in that data so companies like google mr. forced to react to this onrush of data by building software which could capture, store and analyze that data. and we're seeing the tool and techniques that google invented took time to fine their way no the open do nain,ia ho and facebook and be robust usable by nonconsumer web companies so companies like cloudera are take the innovations that google made in reaction to that vast onrush of data which then yahoo! and facebook and others, and now cloudera is making it robust and useful for a wider range of enterprises. >> rose: the politics of the middle east, and
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extraordinary new ways of looking at science and medicine when we continue. >> funding for charlie rose was provided by the following captioning sponsored by rose communications
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from our studios in new york city, this is charlie rose. the middle east where president obama is in the midst of a three day visit to israel it marks his first visit to the country as president, speaking in jerusalem today the prident urged israelies to make sacrifices in the interests of sustainable peace with the palestinians. >> israelis must recognize that continued settlement activity is counterproductive to the cause of peace. and that an independent palestine must be viable, with real borders that have to be drawn. >> rose: the president also affirmed that america will continue to stand behind israel. he made a targeted appeal to the youth in attendance. >> and today i want to tell you, particularly the young people, so that there is no mistake here, so long as there is a united states of america, atem lo lavat.
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(applause) you are not alone. >> rose: joining me martin indyk, director of foreign policy brookings institution, also a former u.s. ambassador to israel. and itamar rabinovich served as israel ambassador to the united states. at the same time he was chief negotiator with the syrian government and president and founder of the israeli institute. i'm pleased to have both of them at this table, at this time, when the president i saying some very interesting things in israel. so welcome. >> thank you. >> thank you. >> rose: characterize this speech by the president. >> this speech was typical obama at his best, working his oratorical magic on a crowd that lapped it up. he spoke very convincingly about his commitment to israel's security and his understanding of their security dilemmas. and particularly underlined what he was going to prevent iran from getting nuclear weaponsment buthen he went
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into a rif about peace and the necessity of peace and the possibility of peace, and why peace has to be just, even saying put yourself, you israelis put yourself in the shoes of the palestinians. and talked over the heads of the leadership of israel to say to them, you need to push your leaders to take risks at peace. >> rose: basically saying you have to make sacrifices on settlements and other issues in order to get some kind of agreement for palestinians, because that is, in fact, in the long-term interest of your national security. >> exactlyive. care about your security, but here's the best way to secure. >> rose: an agreement with the palestinians. >> agreement with the palestinians. >> rose: that gives them some sense. >> two states, two peoplement talked specifically about a jewish state. >> rose: what did you think? >> i agree, it was and very well crafted, very convincing speech. it was in the heart of the mission to speak to the israeli, to the israeli
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public. in a way, president obama has been doing what president sadat had done in the late '70s. he came to jerusalem before the actual negotiations with mr. begin in order to build support for the peace with egypt at the time, and enable mr. begin to make concessions and win public support. so he was investing public diplomacy in the same way, trying to build support among the israeli public, for the painful concessions that will have to be made. >> rose: and so how do you think the prime minister and his party will take this? >> they could have done without this part of the visit but they had their part of the visit in the first day. >> rose: which was iran. >> well, we don't know what went on behind closed doors. but publicly, you know, came out weekend hurt from the elections. and one of the criticisms leveled at him was he
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mismanaged the relationship with the united states. and here was the president all smiles and friendship and patting each other on the back. that was very good for mr. netanyahu. he relished it and he took advantage of it. but this was the first cause. the second cost somewhat less tasty for the prime minister. >> rose: what is less tasty for him? >> he himself endorsed or reendorsed the idea of two state solution for a palestinian state. but his concept of a state or his concept of a settlement is more modest than that of president obama. and when secretary of state kerry returns to the region in a short while to pursue the work, these differences will surface. they were not-- they came out unilaterally by the president in the speech but they will come up fully when secretary kerry returns to the region. >> rose: but how did barack obama come to the presidency
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with what attitudes did israel, what commitments, what sense of significance for him? >> i think you have two book ends to this story. the cairo speech of 2009 and the injuries lem speech of 2013. and he comes to the cairo speech, which was a speech to the arab and muslim world, the belief that bush had ruined america's reputation in the arab and muslim world. and that he needed to fix that. after all, we had 150,000 troops deployed in afghanistan and iraq. he was about to send more. we needed to improve our relations with the arabs and the muslims. and if we could achieve that, i think he felt that would redound to the benefit of israel because then the arabs would be prepared to engage with israel in response to our influence on them, and israel would then respond. that was essentially, as i
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understand, his theory of the case. and so essentially the message that he was playing to the arab world was i care about you. i understand your concerns. and-- . >> rose: the image of america is no longer the image i want you to have of america. >> correct. and by the way, i understand the palestinian issue is your hot-button issue and i'm going to solve it. he promised them that he would close cuan bega began-- guantanamo and solve the palestinian problem. but the message that he sent to israel at the same time was something that he didn't understand, i think. >> rose: what was that message? >> which was that i'm going to distance the united states from israel, in order to curry favor with the arabs. that's the message the israelis received. especially because from cairo he didn't go to israel. >> rose: do you know why he didn't do that at that time? >> because he was trying to curry favor with the arabs. >> rose: he thought the
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arabs would not favor if he made a speech in cairo and made a speech in jerusalem. >> i think that was right. >> rose: was that the correct judgement. >> no, it was a huge mistake. i think he would probably admit that it was a mistake now. but it was a-- it wasn't just an error of scheduling, because for the next three and a half years he barely spoke to the israelis. he gave i think one television interview. he had a foreign service officer whom he didn't even know as ambassador to israel. he didn't send his own ambassador to israel. >> rose: that was george mitchell. >> and he appointed george mitchell to go off and do this. but george-- but essentially, he, the president of the united states after 16 years of president's showering unalloyed affection on the people of israel, bill clinton, george w. bush, comes as president, cold in nature, was distancing himself to israel. the message the israelis got across the spectrum was he doesn't like us.
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he doesn't talk to us. and he doesn't care about us. >> rose: that's the perception in israel. >> that is corct. and of coue it was reinforced by the fact that almost simultaneously to his election israel chose the right wing prime minister who replaced olmert who was wing to go a long distin to make a palestinian deal. >> rose: and before that barak. >> an before that ariel sharon who took a bold step in gaa -- gaza. so the israeli, the israeli political system responded to threats to the threat of iran, to the threat of hezbollah, israel, between 2006 and 2009, went to the right. both the public opinion and the government. so the drama of the collision between the president seeking to draw close to arab and muslims and israeli government veering to the right, intensified the tension that manifested itself at the
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time. and add to this the fact that between the president and the prime minister at that time, there was no trust. i mean both ambassador indyk and myself sat on wt is normally known as one-on-one, but always is two on two because there has to be a notetaker. and both of us were fortunate enough to take notes in very decisive meetings between clinton, rabin and so forth. and you can see what happens when the two decision makers like each other and trust each other. and when they don't. and unfortunately, during the first four years there was a lack of trust between obama and netanyahu. and this is something that will transpire later but to me, e of the most important potential outcomes of this visit would be to restore or to build from the outset. >> rose: a relationship between netanyahu and obama. >> and obama, where they can trust each other. >> but that starts, i think,
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with him building the relationship of trust with the israeli public. you see, his approval ratings went down to 10. that is what they were on friday before they went there. and the irony is that they also went down to 10 in the arab world. because what the arabs wanted was him to fulfill his promise to solve the palestinian problem. when he didn't do that and didn't close guantanamo they lost faith in him. now, i think, us through this speech and through the actions that he has taken on this trip, he will restore or reintroduce himself to the israeli public. >> rose: he wants to reset the israeli-u.s. relationship. >> once he improves his standings amongst the israeli you be pick-- public, netanyahu will be more compliant, why? because the israeli public will punish an israeli prime minister who mishandles a relationship with a popular american president. because obama was unpopular when netanyahu uprated him in the oval office, if you remember that, bebe went up 10 points in the polls. >> in israel.
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>> rose: you wrote the five things president obama can do to win israeli. number one israelis think obama doesn't like him much. he can fix that. the brookings institution can offer to teach what he can do. one, reintroduce himselfment two reach an understand on iran which they may have, we don't know. >> i think they have reached an understanding, best you can tell from the rhetoric but the time line has stretched. bebe said the summer of 2013. and they seem to have agreed that there is a year, the spring, it's the spring of next year which becomes the crunch. >> rose: so they are on the same page on the time line. >> same. >> rose: three, build a relationship of trust with mahmoud abbas. did he do that? >> not clear yet. but it seems that-- softened his position on insisting on a full settlement before negotiations begin. >> a balance of deterance between israeli settlement activity and palestinian unilateral moves in the u.n. or the international criminal court. >> we'll see whacomes out.
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and then john kerry is going to follow up on this. but i suspect that from the way that the wording is coming out there may be a softening of positions on both sides on this in terms of settlement. a restraining settlement activity. >> rose: and palestinian initiatives in the u.n.. >> right. >> rose: okay. the last one is empower secretary of state kerry. >> he hasn't done that yet. he really needs to do it because he's given this speech which has raised expectations sky-high about what the united states is going to do in the peace process. and if he doesn't back kerry up, because kerry is the one that is going to be doing it, kerry won't be able to succeed. >> my guess is knowing secretary kerry and knowing secretary clinton, that secretary kerry will give this because he passionately is interested in this more tension, individually on his own, than secretary clinton. >> he says it that the time, sorry, that the time for middlest envoy is over.
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>> he is a secretary that is widely prceived as being verylose to the president, whose's worried-- if you look at the failures in american middle east diplomacy or israeli diplomacy, when you had a kissinger and nixon or baker and bush 41, with that kind of relationship-- also nixon kissinger. it was known that kissinger had-- connectioner had nixon backingment when he spoke in the name of america or the president it was seen as such. and that, of course, empowers the secretary of state and enables the secretary of state to do it. but middle eastern people, israelis and arabs in a way are spoiled. they need, they're used to having the matt time and attention in order to make progress. in other parts of the world, it's not always the case. but middle eastern breakthroughs which have the huge impact of a drama, you
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know, if you make peace in-- it has certain resonance testimony you make an arab israeli peace agreement it has a different resonancement but it takes a president directly or vicariously through a secretary of state to do that. >> rose: when prime minister netanyahu continues at the level he is of building settlements, does he understand that it does great danger to the idea and to the reality on the ground as well as the idea of some kind of agreement with the palestinians? or does he say i understand that completely, yet the building of settlements for the future is more important to israel and to me? >> well, he has a worldview which is different. he comes from the core of the israeli right wing. and like it or not, he hats that point of view which says that this is the historic homeland, all of it
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is the historic homeland of the jewish people and building settlements in the west bank is a matter of historic right and not a message of calculus. >> is that the opinion in israeli? >> no, but that's the opinion of mr. netanyahu. his party and some of his coalition partners. so it's not just a question of calculus. then there is the question you have to factor in the significance of the relationship with the united states, the demographic issue that faces israel. the iranian issue, there is a linkage of sorts. if you wanted united states tos are work with you on iran you have to accommodate the united states on other issues. and finally, there is the question of say one's place in history, one's heritage. this is netanyahu's third term it may not be-- it may be his last term. there is a generation-- . >> rose: he'already the second longest serving prime minister in the history of the state. >> and there are younger politicians who were very successful in the last
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sections, knocking at the door. so he, i think will have to ask himself how do i want to exit the stage. as somebody who just lingers in power or somebody who has made a real difference. >> rose: what do you think his answer is? do you think he's decided on that. >> no. the question is whether he wants to be a politician or statesman. >> it is another way of putting that. and a lot, you know, a lot depends, it's not himself playg sol tear-- solitaire by him self, the palestinians, the americans, the europeans, it's not decided yet. >> rose: does the president think that he's prepared to take political risks within a constituency that has-- that he has known well and the jewish community in america. >> i think that he was dhaisen-- chastened by the experience in which netanyahu basically did an end run around him, went to congress where there's broad bipartisan support for israel. and was able to stand up to
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the president. i say especially because he didn't have support in the israeli public that netanyahu had this kind of leeway. so i think he's chastened by that. but he can't talk to the israeli people about pushing their leaders to take risks of peace if he is not prepared to take risks himself. so at some point he has to decide. i think he's going to wait and see. >> rose: what is a risk for him? >> well, the ris something exactly as you describe it. that he's going to risk politically at home backlash from the pro israeli community which no longer is just the jewish community. there's a large, broad, christian fundamentalist base to the republican party that will jump all over his bones as well. so it-- he faces a domestic problem there that he is not-- i don't think he's prepared to take that on unless he feels that netanyahu and abu-- he
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treats them equally if not seriousment if he sees they're serious then i think he will be prepared to reengage. but here is the conundrum. kerry is the one who has to test their seriousness. but unless he makes it clear that he's behind kerry, they won't take kerry seriously. >> rose: why is that hard to do? >> because i think-- because the president-- we'll see. but i think the president has basically decided the middle east is a place he wants to turn his back on. he wants to focus on the greener past pass turs of asia. >> i would say if i may that it is not just domestic it's global. because of the linkage, if you fail in the middle east it resonates in north korea and vice versa. so the risk is broader in just the. >> what is going to happen? >> ultimately bashar assad
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will fall. the timing the precise scenario are not known. but the rebels are encroaching. they control more ter another-- territory. they have half of aleppo. they are fighting in the outskirts of damascus am we can see the regime becomes more desperate with its back to the world, may or may not have used chemical weapons. but the calculus is the calculus of desperate -- >> may or may not have used chemical weapons. certainly not in an extent that might be powerful and that might change as the president said, be a game changer. they haven't used him that way. >> right. >> do you believe they would use them that way? that is not-- it's not they. the people bashar assad and those that are supporting him believe that that is the only thing they have left. >> they have made so many mistakes in the past two years that i can't really doubt. it would be a terrible act and a terrible mistake but i
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can't rule it out. >> rose: i think that they're testing obama. they are testing this red line that obama has put down. they have been operating under the assumption, they being the assad regime that there would not be outside intervention. and up to now, they've been right. and they've had a basically free hand in terms of the weapons that they've used all the way up to chemical weapons. but not using them yet. now kerry comes in and cooks up a deal in which others are going to be supplying more lethal arms it to the opposition under this rubric of changing asad's calculus. and there's going to be a move to set up a provisional government inside syria in the territory that's been liberated from the regime. and i think that they use chemical weaponsing we'll see if that's true. but if they did, they used it as a test, in my view, to
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see-- that this means, i think it's true. but we'll see. we need the evidence but if they did it would be to test whether their assumption of military intervention is still correct. >> rose: and what do you think they read, let's assume they did, and it was a test wa, do you think the results are in their mind? >> so far so good from their point of view. the president said last year, use of chemical weapons would be a red line for me. now you said use of chemical weapons would be a game changer for the international community. they would read something different to what i think he meant. he was quite robust in saying they're not going to be allowed. >> the other thing you said is that i think they did. you just said that. you do think that the syrians did it even though on a limited, small way. >> again, would be the military response. >> well, you saw what the
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israelis did, it didn't lead to an outbreak of war. they struck to make clear to the syrians that they cannot hand weapons over to hezbollah that would threaten the-- . >> i would say the conflict reached, i call it now the phase for the battle of america. so explaining one angle. let's look at what the opposition doesment they appoint a prime minister in exile. who happens to be a syrian american. an american citizen. because they want to send a message here, we are not a bunch of jihadies oral quitea related people. we are a cilized opposition. the head of the government in exile is a syrian american, speaks good english. can appeal to american and western audiences. because they all realize both sides realize that the president and the american political system are hedging, and they are both trying to affect it. >> what would bashar al-assad's father have done? >> either-- well, any
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sensible man at the outset when this was a peaceful demonstration of people who were economically deprived would be to have met em halfway, not to shoot at them. but bashar al-assad would either have quashed them effectively at the outset or-- . >> rose: or would have been more effective in opening up a bit. but bashar we know was not the original heir apparent. >> rose: the older son was -- >> so obviously he's not fit for the job. and when he was tested, he failed. >> rose: yeah. so you are suggesting, you are recommending tha the president intervene with weapons. >> if the decision is to effect assad's calculus then i think we have to do two things. number one, is a no-fly zone in the area where the provisional government is now going to be established. >> rose: right. >> and this is-- does not
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require us going into full scale military mode of destroying all of the sands and all of the aircraft on the ground. that's an argument that the pernt gone makes because they basically don't want to do it. who can blame them he this they have a few other problems, afghan tan, sequestration and potentially iran. but when i was in the clinton administration, i had responsibility to the state department for the no-fly zone in northern iraq. and we operate aid no-fly zone here with minimal aircraft operating out of-- we didn't lose one plane, one pilot. and we didn't take out his air force or his sands, just whenever he challenged us, we took him out. >> rose: you responded. >> and you know, i d't understand why we can't do that. they say oh, the syrians have say-- array that is very deadly but look, the israelis somehow can go in and operate there without any problem.
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the u.s. air force can't do that? >> rose: there's also two other countries i want to talk about. one egypt. what is going on? and how is that going to end up? >> end up, i don't know. but ahead lie several years of instability. the country-- . >> rose: civil war, is the military going to have to come bk. >> i don't kw full-fdged-- one of the outcomes may be that the military abstain from coming in, may have to come in. you know, many years ago in egypt-- wrote a very good book called egypt in search of political community. egypt is a unique in the middle east is in that it is a coherent state, unlike syria, unlike iraq, unlike lebanon. but the question of who inhabits that state is-- is at issue. is it going to be an islamist political community or is it going to be a secular, forward oking mmunity that is a place for moth muslims an christian. the country seems to be more
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or less evenly divided over this issue. and i see a long strife ahead with the balance of evenly divided. >> i'm more concerned that the muslim brotherhood now em po-- now in power is going to basically infiltrate, take over, and see them doing this-- . >> rose: consolidate and be less -- >> exactly. >> rose: consolidate and be more autocratic. >> establish an authoritarian rule, that old line which i always thought was a bit tried about one election, one time. seems to be their attitude. and but on the other hand-- . >> rose: including the president. >> well, i would say especially the president, but also, you know, the committee of the muslim brotherhood. you know, they have-- seem to be working quite decisively in that area. and the military does not want to intervene. so in some way they have a free hand except for what we say.
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because they need us. >> rose: the military, or the egyptian period. >> the muslim brotherhood needs us. i mean their economy is going to hell. they have got a real problems. they need imf financing. so we need to engage with them but we also need to stand on our principleses. >> rose: whatever happened to the idea expressed at this table that in an interesting way the responsibility of governing might make islamist parties change. they would face a new reality and that therefore theyould uderstand more than they did when they were outside of power, what it meant. and they would make different choices. >> the answer is that there is no universal-- there is no universal answer for this. because asian is lam with countrieses like indonesia and malaysia is one thing. turkey is another, hezbollah
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and lebanon, egypt, i agree is yet another so there is not one formula. islam is dirse and it will vary from one country to the other. in some countries, islam is in time will become a pragmatic. in other countries, it would be an ongoing revolution, radicallization. >> we have not been clear enough, john kerry has done this on his last trip but we need to be more clear about standing for democratic principleses. minority rights, women's rights, freedom of expression, all of the stuff is democracy that the muslim brotherhood in egypt is begin to to dismantle. >> even with some awful examples of mod rule in which some people -- >> brutality towards women. >> or the military in egypt may look north an look at the turkish brethren and realize that if you wait too long and try to take it to the regime you may rot in
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jail. >> yeah. >> that happened because they wanted to put the military back into the baracks as they said. and they did that and more. >> yeah. baracks in the full sense of the term. >> yes, indeed. let me close by this. what is the essential conflict in the islamic world today. are people who do what you do beginning to see, you know, a real division across the islamic world. >> no, i think the basic issue goes back to the late 18th century when europe became more powerful than the muslim powers. and islam was beginning to be defeated by wester western-- military superiority. the question is do you want to join the west or do you think that you can borrow techniques from the west but not the spirit on the west. so can they do what chinese and japanese did which is to y they acquire from the west what they wanted, keep their own authenticity and be very successful in the world. >> keep that culture but adopt those things that would make them aggressive in terms of global economics.
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>> or straddle the line and remain unhappy. this is the basic debate. >> there is a sectarian divide opening up between-- you see it manifest, coming out of syria but it was already there in iraq and lebanon before, it is exacerbating all of that. but it has the potential to spread to the gulf where you have shi'a majority, population in ba rein with the sunni king. you have shi'a minority in saudi arabia. but they happen to live where the oil reserves are. i mean you have potential there of a real discuss am that's developing am but alongside that, you have another interesting development within the sunni world. between the muslim brotherhood in egypt and muslim brotherhood in turkey. the amir of kwattar and his muslim brotherhood leanings as kind of triumvirate versus the sunni sheikhs of the gf and of course the king of jordan and the king of morocco.
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and that chiefage is beginning more and more important as well. >> rose: thank you martin, good to see you. >> thank you, charlie. >> rose: itamar, thank you. >> thank you, charlie. jeff hammerback certificate here, chief scientist at cloudera, a company he could founded in 2009. it helps organizations make sense of enormous troves of data knowned as big data. one of those organizations is mount sinai school of medicine here in new york. he has been working with doctors there to analyze data related to genetics and organ health. not everybody is a fan of big data. tall ib said big data may mean more information but it also means more false information. i'm pleased to have jeff hammerbacher here at this table for the first time. welcome. >> thank you, dharlie. >> rose: your is an interesting life. so let's talk a little bit about that first. or we at least think so. >> i appreciate that. born in indiana, born in michigan, moved to indiana when i was five. yeah. >> rose: were you because of
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an exaordinary success you had in the tech world where one of those people who were drawn to mathematics, to code, to doing things in the computer science world? >> sure, yeah, when i was in second grade even i was pulled out of the regular math courses and placed in a accelerated math program in my elementary school. and by 5th grade they brought in a professor from local university to work with me on some higher level math. so it was always something that other people recognized in me and always something that i really enjoyed doing. and with computer science my parents, i think, had the foresight to put me into a summer school for coding when i was just eight years old. so i was kind of a rambunctious youngster partially to equip me with skills but get me out of the house and hair for a bit. >> rose: but you were drawn to it. >> i found it interesting as a hobby as much as a subject in school. i often found myself calmed when doing math.
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and my mom actually found a letter that i wrote when i was in second or third grade where it was describing my favorite thing to do in the world. and i'm writing sort of you know like a little kid writes and says i really love eating and doing math it was just always something that, you know, thinking about abstract entities which are sort of timeless and not part of the temp oral realm, just has a way of giving you perspective and helping calming my mind. >> rose: but you love baseball too. >> i loved baseball, yeah. my, i was also kind of drawn to that from an early age. and i was just a very competitive person. i used to cry after every strikeout. and i was very, very focused. and my dadd was a pretty remarkable guy. he worked on the assembly line at gm and had to get up at 4:30 in the morning and get off at 2:30 after a long day of work and he was always my baseball coach so always taking me out if the backyard. and always helping me build those skills. so yeah, it was baseball and math that really summarizes the first 17 years. >> rose: but you ended up at harvard. >> i did end up at harvard.
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it's a little bit of a funny story. i was being recruited as university of michigan for baseball and at sis tenant coach there had taken a job at harvard the next year. so he had seen my academic profile and just so happened that the person who hosted me on my visit to michigan, the player, had also been recruited heavily by harvard so both the play their hosted me and at sis tenant coach who was headed to harvard the next year basically said you should apply to harvard. >> rose: but did you go to harvard because you wanted to play baseball. >> a little bit, yeah. they actually, so in college baseball it's actually more important where you play in the summer than where you play during the baseball, the college school years. so there was a summer league called the cape cod league. and the head coach of harvard at the time was a pitching coach for a cape cod league team, there was a fast path for the harvard university team and cape cod league. i thought it was go tokai good chance to make a kind of sneak in the back door into the cape cod league and potentially show my stuff and maybe make it into the majors some day. >> rose: was mark zuckerberg
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there at the time? >> mark was there, in fact we were in a five or six person seminar together. his sophomore year when he was making the facebook. so i got to know him a little bit then. >> rose: but you didn't stay. and you didn't go to work for facebook. >> i did not. i dropped out of college briefly. made it back a year later unlike mark, i suppose. and ended up graduating in 2005. and for my first year i actually came down here to new york and worked on wall street at bear stearns. and it was only in 2006 that i saw a couple friends from school that i respected a great deal make their way to facebook and that piked my curiosity. >> rose: so you were one of the top, one of the early 100 that went to work there. >> yeah, sure t is hard to know exactly. we had a pretty large customer service group at the time is so first 50 to 80 i think was around the number of employees. >> rose: why did you leave. >> there is a lot of things that made it time for me to leave. i would say number one, the boss that really kept me there and that really
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inspired me adam deanglo had chose tone to leave a few months prior. and i don't like having a boss. and he was a really good hands-off boss. so i really enjoyed working with adam. i also felt that you know, we had built a lot of new technologies am and the time was coming where we needed to spend less time building new things. and more time making the things we had built work well. and i was more interested in kind of building new things. and ultimately i think that i wasn't interested in the product my self. i think it is an amazing product, there are amazing people there. and i had hired people with experience in quantitative social science that i thought were much more motivated by the problem demand than i was. and i needed to just kind of clear a way for those people who were going to do a better job analyzing that data than i could. >> rose: your quote, the best minds of my generation think how they can make people click ads that sucks. >> you know, on my tombstone i think. >> rose: actually vance who wrote in bloomberg business week wrote about you said you might say hammerbacher
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is a conscntious objecter to the advance business of marketing-driven culture that now permeates tech and that's why he quit what he was doing. >> i wouldn't say that i quit because i was a conscientious objecter to the business model. i knew what i was getting into when i joined facebook. i nged stood what the business model would be. i think was just more about finding more interest in the challenge of building scaleable infrastructure for data storage analysis than being interested in using that infrastructure to do data analysis for the data collected by facebook. it's a fascinating data set and nor people who work in cuan tative social science i think it is the most interesting place in the world to, without. unfortunately that just wasn't the reason i was drawn to facebook. so i think it was much more about the problems that i wanted to be work on and much less about objecting to what facebook was work on. >> rose: what kind of company did you want to build. >> i wanted to build a company that was going to be the engine of production of robust, open source tools
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that could be used to do science faster. you know i'm a big-- . >> rose: do science faster. >> yeah, correct. so i felt like there was a big bottleneck in a lot of different scientific labs ranging from astronomy to high energy fisics to oceanography where they were generating tremendous volumes of data and they didn't have the software and hardware infrastructure to be able to capture and analyze that data effectively. >> rose: i remember maybe a year or two ago i was talking to mark an creasean sitting right here. >> sure. >> rose: and reed half-man and a group of people you know. and i say what is the next big idea and everybody talked about mobile but they said the thing you have to watch is what is happening to big data. what's happening? >> we went through a period in which data generation seemed to grow exponentially and that lead to the requirement to build software that could then collect and analyze that data. so if you look at the world wide web, all of a sudden we were taking all the documents, all of the speak jacks that people were serializing its text and we were placing them on-line into an open reposit or of
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linked data walled the world wide web and it turns out there was a tremendous amount of value that was lat ent in that data so companies like google were forced to react to this onrush of data by building software which could capture store and analyze that data. and we're seeing so the tool and techniques that google invented took awhile to find their way into the open source domain via companies like yahoo! and facebook and to be made robust and usable by nonconsumer web properties so companies like cloudera are taking the innovations that google made in reaction to that vast onrush of data which then yahoo! and facebook and others contributed to the open source creation of, and now cloudera is making it robust and usable for a wider range of enterprises. so we are now finally getting to the point where hospitals and governments and other organizations can take advantage of the insights created by google, 10 to 15 years ago. >> rose: but your particular interest is science, and how to accelerate science. >> correct. yeah, that's exactly right. i think i've got a finity
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amount of time i can spend on this planet. and science is generated the most interesting things that i have seen while i have been alive and i want to see it do as much as it can while i'm still alive. >> rose: i will come back to data. >> you bet. >> rose: but let me stay with what you are doing with mount sinai. you became an assistant professor. >> uh-huh. >> rose: what are you hoping to achieve for them? >> sure. so in the short term what i am hoping to achieve is provide them a scaleable infrastructure for data storage and analysis. so that the scientists at mount sinai can do their jobs faster at a lower price. ultimately i would like to be able to use that infrastructure in the short term to improve the quality of health care delivery, lower the cost of health care deliver, potentially discover new therapeutics or diagnostics and integrate these new genomic data sets with existing traditional electronic health care records so the patient and physician can see that. and at the very long term what really draws me to the medical domain is an interest in understanding how the brain works and in particular how the brain breaks. so i'm fascinated by mental
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illness, for example, or neurodegenerative disorders. and i any we understand the symptoms very well but we don't currently understand the mechanisms, what actually happens inside the nervous system. >> rose: but the kinds of things you are doing and others is the reason we are seeing these extraordinary advances in understanding the brain, which have been documented on this program for the last two years on a monthly basis. >> yeah, a lot of the understanding at some point has to pass through software for data storage and analysis. so yeah, i think we part of that pipeline but of course there is innovations in theoretical models of brain funk, innovations in sensors that can generate new data sets to push through that infrastructure so there are innovations up and down the pipeline but yeah, i think novell software tools have been a part of some of those advances. >> rose: mental illness is the subject of particular concern. >> yeah, you know, we have spoken previously about i myself have had people very close to me who struggle with the disease and i myself have been diagnosed
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as bipolar too as well as having general anxiety disorder. so my interest in understanding the brain predates my own diagnoses but having gone through that process and having spent a lot of time with psychiatrists for several years, as a curious person are you lead to attempt top understand the state of the art. and you can recognize when reading the literature that there is uncertainty even in the name of mental illnesses. regardless of the mechanism of the mental illness, even carving the world into a set of diseases is not yet certain. so in fact, you know, we're in a fairly auspicious year in that the dsm which is sort of the core document which allows to us class if i too mental disors is undergoing a major revision for the first time in many, many years. so psychiatrists around the world are revisiting this question of, you know what is a mental disorder and what are the categories of mental illness. >> rose: an finding extraordinary things in terms of where there might be genetic linkage between
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different kinds of issues that come from the structure of the brain. >> precisely and that linkage you refer to, some of the ground breaking anal cease were performed by folks nowat mount sinai, pamela sklara also in the department of genetics who did some great work, and in her time i believe at princeton in discovering links between schizophrenia and by polar at a genetic level and it feels like there might be some core functional defects which are manifested in different ways. >> rose: you had a friend who commit -- committed suicide. >> that's right, my very close friend of mine in college, steve schneider, similar people, we both grew up, he grew up in ohio, i indiana, both pitchers on the baseball team and we both studied math at harvard. so he was someone i grew close with in college. and sort of observed the degradation in his mental state and it ended with him taking his own life. about seven years ago now. and so yeah it was very difficult process to observe and it certainly built some
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deep seeded motivation in me to understand what was happening. >> rose: if you were doing all this over, would you go in a different direction? i mean would you have gone into some aspect of life sciences directlrather than coming the way that did you through mathematics and computer science and writing code? wince don't think so. you know, i feel like i studied some life sciences while in college. so i spent some time in courses on neuroscience and computational neuroscience and it seemed clear to me that many of the innovations were going to be happening in the development 6 novel sensors to generate more data about the brain. and in novel software tools and statistical techniques. >> rose: "time" magazine had a big thing recently on big ideas and talked about sensors, health sensors. give us insight into that application about technology and our understanding of the way the human body functions. >> sure, so if for example i
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will give an experience from my past. so i had an issue in which i discovered there is a lump in my chest. i was like that's change strange. actually my wife saw it first so i went into the doctor's office. and the doctor he kind of put his hands on my chest and felt around. he said i think you have this but see this other guy. i went to that doctor and he put his hands on my chest and said i think you have this. i thought don't you want to use any sort of measurement device to, you know, see what is in my body or some how quantify what my body, what is happening within my body. and if i contrast that with diagnosing an issue in a service that we might have deployed to power face with dotcom, the amount of inface we have into a serving running inside a facebook data service is significantly greater than the amount of insight into our own body. the amount of data we are capturing about ourselves is tiny today. and i think you know, i often say data is the intermediate representation of science. so i wonder how are we ever going to dot science to understand how our body functions if we don't have
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more ubiquity is low cost measurement. there is a guy at san diego, larry smar, a fascinating fellow who took a similar path i think. he's actually worked on the infrastructure more on the networking side than on the data storage side but he worked on if for scaleable scientific data analyses and has written papers on the quantifications he performed on himself. and the insights that he has been able to make. and there is another famous example from standford mike schneider where they actually combined sequencing of genome with longitudinal measurements in a deep way about what is happening in his bloodstream and et cetera. and they were able to observe the onset of certain disorders during that experience. so i think that we're going to enter a period in medicine in which it's going to be much more routine to have continuous low cost measurements happening. rdz you say enter a period, are we there now? >> we're on the precipicement we have guys like larry smar who are already performing these analyses on themselves.
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but it's not really being driven by the physician, it's being driven by curious patients. think what we are waiting for is that big wind. you need the physicians are to the going to be convinced unless they see an improvement in health outcomes based on this self-quantification. so i think we're-- the tools remerging to be able to self-quantify and the early adopters are performing the self-quantification but the math adoption and the people who are actually doing health care delivery is waiting for a few big winds from self-quantification in health outcome. >> rose: what would be a big wind. >> if you could demonstrate that prediabetes say good one are you can start to see the onset of diabetes and you can cause people to change their eating habits so they can avoid getting turning into a diabetic. so if we can demonstrate the use of this ubiquity is low cost measurement it to prevent more people from becoming diabetic that would be big. >> rose: "time" magazine has a big thing on cancer today and cancer research. >> i saw that.
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>> rose: and the idea simply is a group of different cancer researchers working together and collaborating and finding out where the individual research may overlap and there be sort of paths and pathways that they learn about. as i suggested in terms of some of the genetic bases in terms of various parts of the brain, they are being able to see patterns there. >> yeah, i agree. and today to get that information you usually have to perform a biopsy of the tumor. so if we had something which was much less invasive, much easier to sort of passively collect data about the tumor on an ongoing basis, then that could be fed into predictive models that could tht stasis and other issues. >> rose: what is it that you want to accomplish? >> yeah, what would make me feel really satisfied is if i could find people whose lives are not, if you look at the mortality and morbidity of disease and the global disease burden of the various things that are inflicted upon humans, you know, obviously cancer and heart disease are massive
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but mental disorders are-- it's really remarkable if you look at who reports on the global burden of disease of mental illness. i suspect even those estimates are low because many people are suffering from issues but aren't willing to-- it took many years to be diagnosed myself. so i think if i could better quantify what mental illness is, and use our deeper understanding of the mechanisms of mental illness to develop new treatments and allow people to live longer and more disease free lives because of novel treatments for these mental disorders that would feel deeply satisfying to me, both because from an intellectual perspective i would learn more about how the brin works and i think we're all fascinated by that. and from an all truistic perspective hopefully it would change people's lives for the better. >> rose: where are other application of t measurement of data and being able to translate that information into constructive ends. >> well, obviously in the consumer web do nain we've
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done a good job of improving the quality of advertise ams that we show. there is tremendous value there. i think in the e-commerce domain we can now predict what you are more likely to purchase, product recommendations onsites like amazon.com and ebay.com. in the agribusiness companies like monsanto and pioneer are using these technologies to figure out which seed to plant and which square of land. so we can improve crop yields through the use of data analysis and financial services we can better predict whose more likely to default on loans. we can better predict the rate at which we should give a loan. if there are a lot of things that can happen there. and then some of our other customers, speddia, for example, is doing work on better protect the cost of flights, there are companies like chevron which are using our software to better identify where you might find oil underneath the surface is so there is a really wide variety of range.
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>> finally this. the critique, david brooks had said the philosophy of the day of data is something. the big question is rewarding. in which situation should we rely on intuitive pattern recognition and ignore intuition and follow the data? >> it is a great question. another book recently which used the trades numerical imagination versus narrative imagination. and i think it's really important that we don't choose one in favor of the other. we see each for the values that they deliver. so i don't necessarily see the utter dominance of the numerical way of thinking. but i do think it's an important tool set to bring to bear. and i honestly think that it's been massively underutilized through the course of human history. we are just now entering a period where the vast majority of our actions are going to be digitized so let's at least develop the tools and give ourselves the options of performing numerical thinking alongside our ver well developed mechanisms for narrative thinking. >> great to you have here.
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come back. >> great to be here, thank you. >> rose: thank you. captioning sponsored by rose communications captioned by media access group at wgbh access.wgbh.org
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>> funding for charlie rose has been provided by the coca-cola company. supporting this program since 2002. >> an american express, additiona funding provided by these funders. >> and by bloomberg, a provider of multimedia news and information services worl

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